September 1, 2017

Now the transfer window has closed, we will be required to notify the Premier League of our 25-man squad.

To summarise the rule, as I do each year, we are able to name a 25-man squad if eight of the players are ‘home grown’. We could name fewer than eight home grown players, but would need to also name fewer than 25 players in our squad — for example, if we only have seven home grown players, we can name a 24-man squad, 6/23, 5/22, etc. A home grown player is defined as follows:

… one who, irrespective of his nationality or age, has been registered with any club affiliated to the Football Association or the Welsh Football Association for a period, continuous or not, of three entire seasons or 36 months prior to his 21st birthday (or the end of the season during which he turns 21).

We do not need to name players who are under 21 on our squad list; for the 2017/18 campaign, players considered ‘under 21’ will have been born on or after 1st January 1996.

Since the beginning of last season we have lost six potential ‘home grown’ players (Kyle Walker, Nabil Bentaleb, Luke McGee, Nathan Oduwa, Filip Lesniak, William Miller) from our squad list. We have added non-home grown players in Moussa Sissoko, Fernando Llorente, Paulo Gazzaniga, Serge Aurier and Davinson Sánchez (though Sánchez has a ‘freebie’ year as an under-21).

Also, since last season, Georges-Kévin N’Koudou has passed the age threshold and will need to be named in the squad, whereas last year he was simply included in our list of under-21 players.

Our ‘named’ 25-man squad should consist of the following (* = home grown player):

We are then able to select any players who were born on or after 1st January 1996 without needing to register them. This means that any of the following (plus the other first and second year academy scholars) would be available for selection. NB: I have presented them in age order.

As it stands, we have only 20 players that need to be included in our squad list, four of whom are home grown players. This means that we have ‘squad space’ for one more non-home grown player, or for one non-home grown player and four home grown players. From next year, Harry Winks, Connor Ogilvie, Dele Alli, Davinson Sánchez and Joe Pritchard would need to be named in our squad list should we wish to use them. The fact that four of these are considered home grown is useful, though I would suspect that Ogilvie and Pritchard will be permanently transferred either in January or in the summer.